Originally Posted By: floyd jane
Todd,

OUTSTANDING!

If you are calling this "very rough" I can't WAIT to hear your "smooth"!!

Truly intriguing lyrics. Remarkable melodies. Incredible vocals - excellent tone , excellent pace, terrific processing - they sit in the mix perfectly.

Man! you've got talent. Bucket loads...

Can you expanded on the "Cut-Up Method"? And where do you come up with such terms and "groups"???....

Great stuff.

fj



Hi, FJ.

Thanks again for your kind words and the specificity of what you like about the song and for your questions. Makes me feel better about my songwriting. Thank you for that.

You asked about the Cut-Up method. This technique started with the Dadaists in the 1920s when Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. The technique become popular in the 50s and 60s with William Burroughs. Bob Dylan used it a bit, as did David Bowie and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. When I do a cut-up, I like to get at least 2 texts. I often get a really bad science fiction book and a really bad romance novel. Then I flip through them and cut out words and phrases that I like. I arrange them until I find something interesting and then I glue them onto a piece of colored paper. Sometimes I'll recut them and paste them down again. From this poem-like object, I write a rough draft of a lyric. Then I continue to explore the images, sounds, and personas as I write subsequent drafts. Eventually I come up with some music and inevitably, as I'm trying to get the lines to fit the music, I make more rewrites. I usually get somewhere between 8 to 10 drafts, sometimes more.

Most of the Facebook writing groups I'm in started from relationships formed at a songwriting retreat called Crooked Crow. A close friend of mine, Johann Wagner, started the retreat, and I've been both a participant and a teacher there. Lots of great artists have come through the retreat: Adrieanne Lenker and Buck Meek of Big Thief, Gregory Alan Isakov, Pete & Crystal Damore of Ordinary Elephant. Johann Wagner and I were friends at college. I was a graduate student in poetry and he was an undergrad studying jazz guitar. Along with several other songwriters, we started a writing group called The Kitchen Sink Poets. We explored a lot of experimental and fun ways to "discover" a text. When I was a teacher at the university, I also taught these methods to my students: cut-up technique, translitic, ekphrasis, etc. Through the years, Johann and I (and others) have continued to use these methods to find fresh and new material.

Thanks again for your kind words, and if you'd like to know more about any of these techniques and how to apply them to songwriting, I'd be happy to share what I know.

Cheers,
Todd

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